Can all keys be represented as a single char in c++?

Question

I've searched around and I can't seem to find a way to represent arrow keys or the escape key as single char in c++. Is this even possible? I would expect that it would be similar to \t or \n for tab and new line respectively. Whenever I search for escaped characters, there's only ever a list of five or six well known characters.

Answer 1

char variables usually represent elements in the ASCII table.
http://www.asciitable.com/
there is also man ascii on unix. If you want arrow keys you'll need a more direct way to access keyboard input. the arrow keys get translated into sequences of characters before hitting stdio. If oyu want direct keyboard access consider a GUI library, sdl, direct input to name a few.

Answer 2

Not possible; keyboards built for some languages have characters that can't be represented in a char, and anyway, how do you represent control-option-command-shift-F11 in a char?

Keyboards send scancodes, which are either some kind of event in a GUI system or a short string of bytes that represent the key. What codes depends on your system, but on most terminal-like systems, ncurses knows how to deal with them.

Answer 3

There aren't any escape characters for the arrow keys. They are represented as Keycodes, afaik. I suggest using a higher level input library to detect key presses. If you want to do it from scratch, the approach taken might vary with the specific platform you are programming for.

In any case, back in the days of TURBO C, I used -

//Wait for keypress
//store input in ch  
//see if the ASCII code matches the code for one of the arrow keys  

Answer 4

The short answer is no.

The long answer is that there are a number of control characters in the standard ANSI character set (from decimal 1 to decimal 31, inclusive), among which are the control codes for linefeed, carriage return, end-of-file, and so on. A few are commonly interpreted as arrows and the escape key, but only for compatibility with terminals.

Standard PC keyboards send a 2- or 3-byte control code that represents the key that was pressed, what state it's in, which control/alt/shift key is pressed, and a few other things. You'll want to look up "key codes" to see how to handle them. Handling them differs between operating systems and the base libraries you use, and their meaning differs based on the operating system's configured keyboard layout (which may include characters not found in the ANSI character set).